One day my friend got sick. He got sicker and sicker and didn't get better. His face grew gaunt and the bones in his wrists stuck out at sick angles. His lips, as chapped as the thirsty desert earth. Green is the colour of life, yes, but his disposable clothing hung off him like a coat on a hanger, and it was green like sickness. Green like the veins all showing up his pale inner arms. Arsenic and poison snakes. His sunken, red-rimmed eyes. His hair had fallen out, and his poor old skull looked small and sad, the last egg in a green cardboard egg box. I took his hand in mine. Once we put latex gloves on the skeleton in our science class room. It felt like that.
I asked him if he was going to die. He seemed surprised by the question; only for its simplicity. What's 1 + 1? How many sides does a square have? Are you going to die?
He smiled, sadly. "Aren't we all?" he said. "Aren't we all?"
I am going to write a story of some variety, long or short, fictitious or factual, every single day for a year. Wish me luck.
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